Warm Up Methods

When it comes to warming up the body, okay, you need to make sure that you warm up the area, particularly, that you're going to be using during exercise. So if your exercise is going to involve your full body, you need to make sure that you warm up your full body. Now, when it comes to just general movement, okay, you need to make sure that your form throughout stays strong and positive, and remember that you are slowly elevating your heart rate. Slowly elevate it to the point where you max out and then your body is ready to perform. Start nice and slow, think about your positioning, think about your form, think about what you are going to do.

For example, if I was going for a run, I would make sure that I slowly went through a nice deep squat, down through the heel, full extension, back up, chest up, nice relaxed eye line on my neck. And then when I start to feel warmer, I will start to increase the pace. A bit faster and faster and faster. Then from there, when I feel comfortable, go into what I call a plyometric. So what I'm doing then, is I'm triggering the fast-twitch muscle fibres in the body and I'm going to take that squat from a floor-based one to an elevated up off the floor. Once it becomes elevated, the fast-twitch muscle fibres will start triggering, the nerves will be firing better and my body will perform better for the run later after the warm-up.

When it comes up to warming up my upper body, physically, any sort of range of movement through my upper body is going to trigger blood recruited to that muscle, therefore, it will increase the warmth of the muscle. Now when it comes to actually warming up the muscle, the reason why we do it is it's like, the principle is like an elastic band. If you pull an elastic band cold, it will rupture and it will break. If you pull it nice and slowly, it will slowly warm up through friction. Then from there, you can get more range and you will have more range of movement in whatever you're trying to do with the elastic band. So for example, that's exactly what we are trying to do with the muscular tissue. We are trying to warm it up over time, so we can get more and more range and we've got less and less chance of having a rupture of any sort.

It's very simple. We just need to use the upper body muscles. The deltoids, okay, we could do an inverted press, which are the shoulders, okay. We could do a nice wide arm press-up and trigger lots of the pectoral major. We could do a nice narrow press-up and go straight into a very dominant tricep press, okay. So you... Relying purely on the tricep to extend the arm and put tension through the triceps, so we are warming up the tricep. For example, when it comes doing biceps. Now it's very simple, any resistance through the hand, pulling it from the wrist towards the chest, is going to warm up the bicep. It's as simple as that. If you've got a resistance band at home, then that is a perfect piece of warm-up equipment.

When it comes up to warming up the core. Now it's very simple. Any movement you do through your core, it will put tension on your muscles. So for example, just do a basic crunch or a sit-up or anything like that, just to basically get some better range of movement, nice and controlled, and then later in life, you can increase its intensity to put more tension through the abdominal wall. When you're starting to exercise, that is.